The Devil Never Sleeps

by Andrei Codrescu

  Ratio of Derriere versus Frontal

  The Supreme Court let stand an anti-nude dancing ruling by a lower court in Florida after arguments in which it took 346 words to define a derriere and 69 to describe the female frontal region. In other words, there are roughly four times as many words for the back-o-zone, a ratio that seems exaggerated on the face of it. Granted, the derriere may at most be twice as large as the front. But there are surely numerous cases where the derriere is only half the size of the front. Granted also that both females and males sport a more or less identical behind, so that it’s possible more words were coined over time by both sexes. Clearly, the derriere is the better known of the two and subject to a great deal more attention in both the vulgate and the savantic. The derriere also has three extra functions, namely waste elimination, seating support, and use in insults, which feed their own vocabularies into the region. However, in terms of visibility, both derriere and breasts are out there, unlike the genital regions which are buried in mystery and, doubtlessly, inarticulation.

  Anthropologists have theorized that when our species rose upright female genitalia became folded in and hidden while the male’s became exposed and vulnerable. The derriere and female breasts, on the other hand, became more pronounced in both sexes. And if that is the case, why is the derriere getting away with all the words? Is it because it’s funnier? In Germany, for instance, the derriere is considered so funny that its mere mention causes waves of hilarity. It is a pity that the Supreme Court heard no arguments about the rest of our naughty parts. It is my guess that the number of terms used to describe breasts, 69, may be identical to that of terms regarding other male and female characteristics. If that is the case, and why shouldn’t it be, both the numbers of male and female terms together, the sum of everything we hide, would still pale before the derriere. The law now, as it stands in St. John’s County, Florida, requires that one-third of a dancer’s buttocks must be covered and about one-fourth of females’ breasts. Those Supreme Court judges, seated firmly on their derrieres, ought to have pondered the paucity of terms before jumping to their conclusion. Instead of forbidding nude dancing, they should have required it until the frontal vocabulary reached parity with the behindal.

  Beauty & Safety

  Whenever I go to a beautiful place, I imagine myself living there. I went to Boone, North Carolina, a mountain-sheltered paradise where rustic craftsmen sell quilts from shops that smell like pine. On the way there, Moravian cookie makers in sixteenth-century clothes sell you paper-thin ginger wafers. They bake them in the huge ovens that scared the daylights out of Hansel and Gretel. What is it with paradise that inspires instant terror? I asked Lynn Doyle, local poet and observer, after we bought these great cookies. I don’t know, Lynn said, all I know is that Boone, North Carolina, is at the center of international intrigue. You won’t get too far running over here. Lynn informed me that just a short time before I arrived, a Swede was found murdered in the woods. This Swede, it turns out, had once been suspected in the assassination of Sweden’s prime minister. It was speculated that other assassin Swedes might be hiding in these beautiful mountains. But the intrigue suffered when it was discovered that a local sherif’s deputy probably killed the Swede for visiting his girlfriend’s trailer on the full moon. And not long before that, said Lynn, two fighter jets cornered a single-engine dope plane all the way from Mexico to near Boone and caused it to crash. No one was thought to have survived this crash, but a day or so later two really beat-up guys were hitchhiking up the road. They were picked up and never seen again. You mean they got away? I gasped. Sure did, said Lynn, with that look of, “we sure don’t like the feds around here.” There must still be gin mills up here, I said in wonder. Sure are, replied Lynn. Later I met a man with a wild beard named Tommy Thompson who told me that when I got a motorcycle I should come to his place, a bed & breakfast for bikers. I think I will. Get a bike, that is. Have Budweiser for breakfast. Roar into the clouds pouring in between the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Part Six

  Virtuality Takes Command

  Virtuality Takes Command

  Thank you for asking me here to speak in person. It’s so retro. You could have easily produced a virtual Codrescu to do the job—and in a few years, I am sure, the virtual Codrescu will be as close to the real thing as a set of parameters can produce.

  You can still experience me virtually, however, if you close your eyes. It will be just like listening to the radio.

  But I doubt that any of you are interested in virtuality to that extent. In fact, you’ll have to look hard to find anyone—and that includes the technogeeks at Microsoft—who is so invested in virtuality that he would prefer to get his information without the ambiguous and paradoxical participation of all the senses.

  It would be hard indeed to find such a person, but there are some who come close. I met two young men who spend over fourteen hours a day in something called MUD—a Multiuser Dungeon—which is an imaginary world created by a number of players with shifting and evolving identities, many of whom are part human and part animals. These two cybernauts kept their eyes to the ground while I spoke to them, and when I asked them if they felt uncomfortable in human society, they both nodded yes. When I pressed them about what exactly made them uncomfortable, one of them mumbled, “It’s limited.”

  That surprised me because I would have thought that the opposite might have been the case. Spending fourteen hours glued to the screen, using very little of your body, seems limited to me. I am no great sportsman, but I get tremendous enjoyment from the pure animal activity of a body which, I believe, puts forth its own information and discovers things that are not immediately quantifiable.

  But then it turned out that these two guys were pursuing an interdisciplinary, cross-species Ph.D. in Cultural Studies. They were post-humanists.

  And as far as I could see, they had all the elements that would make for a successful academic career later on. They were utterly dependent on a machine that, like the university, provided for their physical needs; they had an ideology that was virtually defiant but only virtually so; they could question and change identity at the push of a button; and they related to other entities that shared their ideology. They could push the limits, any limits, including biological ones; they could include all the excluded they could imagine; they transgressed cultural and social borders; they were interdisciplinary, nomadic, and free-spirited, all within the sixteen-inch dimensions of their fishbowl. And they barely had time to eat, sleep, or read books.

  Most of the computer folk I’ve talked to in Seattle tell me that they spend an average of ten to fourteen hours in cyberspace. The eight-hour workday no longer exists for most Americans plugged into a computer. My friend Linda Stone designs virtual reality environments, which she studies for clues to emerging behaviors in cyberspace. Her own code of ethics forbids her to interact in cyberspace under any persona too radically different from her own, which is represented by an Avatar. Linda’s ethics are unusual in cyberspace—most VR users are postmodernists, who are there precisely in order to get away from their habitual definition. Or, as the Czech writer Robert Gal put it, “My moral code prevents me from being myself.”

  Linda designed her Avatar with an eye to accurate self-representation: It was a cartoon of a bespectacled young woman dressed in a business suit. I didn’t point out that the Avatar was slimmer and crisper somehow, and that it would stay that way throughout its cyber-interactions, while she, herself, might look less than crisp after fourteen hours at her computer terminal. The one nagging problem of virtuality right now is that a physical being persists in being singularly present both before and after the virtual experiment. I expect that this won’t be a problem for long.

  Anyone can design their own Avatar, as well as select one from a preexisting menu of various types, depending on what environment one chooses to haunt. The one we visited was a bar called Cheers, which was fairly Grated, and the Avatar menu offered a Popeye the Sailo
r, a Vixen, a Cigar-Chomping Financier, a Dandy, a Torch Singer, and I forget what else. These beings communicated through cartoon balloons over their heads that filled with words when you typed. It was possible also to conduct a private conversation with only one other person: In that case, the words appeared in a balloon circumscribed by a dotted—instead of an unbroken—line.

  Behavior in cyberspace was soon demonstrated in two ways: A Torch Singer said, apropos of nothing, to the five or six people in the room: “My boyfriend is gay. Any advice?,” to which a Vixen replied, “I am really a gay man. What do you want to know?” At the same time, Popeye approached Linda and said, “Whatcha doing Friday night?” Linda clicked on Popeye’s profile and discovered that Popeye was a soldier stationed in Bosnia. She replied privately, “What’s Bosnia like?” Surprise. “How did you know?” While Linda and the soldier became involved in a private conversation, the group was discussing the dilemma of the woman with the gay boyfriend. Floating in the distance at the far end of the bar were two arches resembling McDonald’s. “What’s there?” I asked. “That,” Linda said, “is the portal to another world.”

  All of these encounters in all their complexity were taking place in real time. The line dividing the virtual and the real was extremely blurred: After a while I fell into Linda’s habit of dropping the word “virtual,” and describing what was happening inside the screen in the same terms as our interaction outside the screen. And, in fact, there was little distinction. We were barely conscious of any border between the inside and the outside: We were utterly involved in the exchange. The only difference was that if we got bored we could escape to another world, or to another university, one less connected to possibly real problems in this here—possibly—real world.

  In Seattle, where Linda works, I met a number of cyberspace luminaries. I met two game designers who had worked for the U.S. military and were now turning their attention to the commercial market. They strapped me into a headset and I headed down a tunnel where various entities were shooting at me. Or so I thought, until they told me that it was I who was shooting the entities—but being part of “the old paradigm,” I couldn’t tell who was me in cyberspace. I was identifying with the enemy. Since I wasn’t going to die anyway, I had a hard time figuring out why the enemy was the enemy, though I would have known it instinctively had I been a true cybernaut.

  I met a medical researcher who designs training environments for doctors. I killed a perfectly good virtual patient by following a heart-surgery map. This environment was doubtessly useful, just like air-flight simulators are useful, but it was a scientific, not a cultural, environment.

  I also met Dr. Brickman, one of the founders of VR, now working on the next generation of virtuality-generating systems. Dr. Brickman found both the Internet and VR in its present form quaintly passé. The next step was complete virtuality, technology capable of creating complete sensorial immersion. I got the impression that the meshing of biological and cybernetic systems was not far off, and that defining “human beings” was going to become a lot more difficult in the near future.

  You may well ask, what really does any of this have to do with us? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Some people may see the coming virtuality as simply an opportunity to create better research and learning opportunities with the aid of clever programming. Already, many of us are becoming quite adept at using the Internet and learning the idioms of interactivity to become more efficient.

  But more efficient at what? Already there are cars that can whisk us away from campus at a moment’s notice, television sets to calm our agitated minds, advertising to incorporate us in the larger community, consumption needs that involve some serious forays into capitalism, personal relationships that need therapy and drugs, and labor issues having to do with pay raises needed to keep all the above functioning. Does cyberspace provide a support system for the bothersome difficulties of making a nice bourgeois academic living while deconstructing the society that makes it impossible?

  And I didn’t even mention students who are truly lost in cyberspace, hoping to meet us there for an all-too-brief virtual confrontation—that they are going to win. In cyberspace. Virtually.

  I am surely exaggerating, but I would like to know, for instance, how the make-believe world of cyberspace participates in our efforts to understand a century in which human beings have done their practical best to eliminate humans altogether. For one thing, to answer my own question, we have more information. We have records on film and tape of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, for instance. We have tons of information that needs only the authority of a compassionate analysis to yield a moral charge. But I challenge you to find a minibyte of such compassionate authority for every million megabytes of information. The “author” with the authority to produce such a moral charge has been dismantled by various ideologies. It is amazing to see that, fifty years since the Holocaust, and one decade since the prolapse of communism, ideologies and not moral outrage are still the dominant trend in our cultural, virtual, never-never lands.

  That’s not our job, some of you may be thinking. We are not preachers, demagogues, prophets, or Steven Spielberg. We are scholars whose job is to work with text, produce text, and provide whatever textual interpretations we think are viable. In this respect, most of us see the new technology as something we can use in support of textuality, a sort of “visual aids,” as the old phrase quaintly had it.

  But when our students are wearing computers capable of keeping them involved in several environments at once, we might have to accept the fact that we are just one “channel” in a menu offering thousands. If you think that it’s difficult now to know where a daydreaming student is, you can imagine the problem of locating the missing student traveling virtually through designed environments whose sole purpose is to tune out text.

  Daydreaming has already been replaced to a large extent by programming. Television has effectively turned daydreamers into screenwriters—and when I say that the purpose of programming is to tune out text I mean precisely that. We may have to resign ourselves to becoming “textual aids” to an interactive, visual world.

  What this interactive, visual world says—what its text is—is made infinitely more complex, however, by the fact that this text does not give a fig for interpretation, or criticism.

  The longer we live in the Age of the Image, the more we are rewired into an eternal present. In the future, there will be plenty of text, of course, but text to be looked at, visually. A “text” will always be present, but it will be only one of many graphic devices with a fading referential universe. This referential universe will be crowded in by images that will replace psychological, social, moral, and religious narratives, while strengthening political manipulation. Or just manipulation. The basic text of the coming virtuality will be “The User’s Guide,” which, with appended “Operating Instructions,” will replace the Constitution, the Bible, and all our books. It will be written in a language not subject to multiple interpretations—hopefully—and blindingly clear to the user, or the addict. No one will ever know that the ancestor of this language was none other than the Pidgin English that once came with cheap transistor radios made in Hong Kong, a mysterious language that itself succeeded the Ur-language of the Mechanical Age known as “Instructions-for-Assembly.”

  Politics in the age of the image is almost entirely virtual. I say “almost,” because now and then the body politic surprises itself by going directly to the source, to television, for its inspiration, bypassing entirely the conventional paid political imagery—as was the case when Minnesotans elected Jesse “the Body” Ventura governor. Jesse was more “organic TV” than paid political advertising TV. Such a politics is “ultra virtual.”

  Within the virtuality of national politics resides the secondary virtuality of academic politics which, being textual, harks back to the quaint (textual) notions of Left and Right.

  The right would like to preserve an idealized memory in order to prevent
too many “outsiders,” from changing the so-called canon. The left would like to begin in an idealized all-inclusive future and proceed backward to revise the right’s idealized history. In the ideological rush to define what kind of democracy we should have, we have been ignoring certain factors that make such discussion tenuous if not downright moot.

  In the first place, American society has been changing at a pace that our cultural critics haven’t even begun to map, let alone comprehend. By the next decade, Spanish will be spoken as much as English. New waves of immigrants are altering the physical space of cities, confounding old patterns of behavior, diet, and community. Electoral patterns are changing, as more and more outsider groups find their political voice. Books by new Americans are appearing at a staggering rate. There is a flourishing poetry scene in the big cities, where new languages, such as Nuyorican, can be heard. Music, theater, and art, are acquiring accents, new textures, tastes, and moves. What Gomez-Pena, the Chicano performance artist, calls Border World is a whole new culture on both sides of the Mexican-American border.